PART I

Passivity and Intersubjectivity

1 Freedom and Passivity: Attention,
Work, and Language

john russ on

We often think of our freedom as a kind of independent power of choice

and action that floats over the surface of things, rather as a searchlight
might selectively pass over things. I want to take up Merleau-Ponty’s
analysis of the act of paying attention – in which he criticizes a compa-
rable “searchlight” model of attention – as an exemplary case study of
freedom, to show how our freedom is always embedded in its situation.1
I will consider, basically, how, in attention, our “free power” is in crucial
ways given by the determinacies it addresses: this will be the inherent
“passivity” of our “active” nature. This initial discerning of the passive
dimension of the act of attention seems to limit the independent author-
ity of freedom. Through considering the phenomena of habituation and
work, however, we will eventually see that, because this passivity is
the passivity of a practice, the things that give us our abilities are them-
selves vulnerable to our freedom while being insufficient to command
it: although our experience is indeed fundamentally characterized by
passivity, that passivity falls short of normativity. In the domain of
communication, however, we will discover that intersubjectivity is an
essential dimension of passivity that can constitute an inherent norma-
tive answerability within our freedom: it is ultimately by freedom that
freedom can be definitively limited, so it will be through our passivity
with respect to others that a compelling normative dimension emerges.

I.  The Phenomenon of Attention

Let me first give three examples of experiences of paying attention.2

(1) If I am trying to become a better volleyball player, my coach might
show me a video and say “pay attention to what the player at the net
26  John Russon

does here.” I would then watch the video with an explicit orientation
towards a particular individual, and would pointedly look at that
player with the expectation of seeing something significant happen.
(2) A second attitude is a detached staring that could happen when I
am (aggressively or defensively) experiencing my disengagement from
a situation, and I address the object – perhaps a person – confronta-
tionally with my direct gaze. (3) A third attitude is paying attention to
music, which will mean giving myself over to absorption in it, either
by listening or dancing, allowing myself to be overtaken by the rhythm
and the emotional flow of the music instead of just hearing it in the
background. These attitudes of looking at, staring, listening, and danc-
ing can all legitimately be called “paying attention,” although they can
be stances of engagement or of disengagement, of analysis or of absorp-
tion. Let us note some constitutive features of these modes of attending.
(i) Paying attention is a practice, and it is a skill that must be devel-
oped. Imagine children in an elementary school classroom. Although
there certainly are matters in which children can be absorbed for long
periods, there is good reason for saying they have “short attention
spans.” One of the main tasks of their growing up is precisely to become
more adept at paying attention, by developing patience and concentra-
tion, both of which require substantial emotional and bodily education.
I must learn to control my emotions – to be self-possessed – if I am
to be patient and to endure a process that might otherwise be boring,
frustrating, or in other ways irritating.3 To concentrate, I must be able,
for example, to sit still in a chair for many hours or to hold my body in
some other single posture unflinchingly. Paying attention also requires
education. I cannot attend to what you are saying if I have not learned
your language, and although I try, I cannot really pay adequate atten-
tion to the music – I cannot truly listen to it – without having learned
how to appreciate it. To be sure, the ability to pay attention is a nascent
power in the child, but it is a power that has a path of development over
which it emerges in ever-richer forms.
(ii) Acts of paying attention are always embedded in particular con-
texts, and their enactment makes a difference in those contexts. My look-
ing at the volleyball video is (a) a gesture of compliance with my coach’s
instructions, (b) a commitment to furthering my project of developing
as a player, and (c) a particular placement of my body within the room
as well as a usage of electricity. My staring at my colleague across the
room (a) makes him uncomfortable and leads him to stop whispering
to the person beside him, (b) is an expression of my irritation, and
 Freedom and Passivity  27

(c) is a posture of uncommon stillness. My listening to the music (a) is

an endorsement of shared activity of my companions and of the others
in the music hall, (b) accomplishes a stepping out of the pressures of my
workday, and (c) is a practice of sitting still with my eyes closed. In all
of these cases, “paying attention” is a bodily action within a distinct and
determinate spatial setting, an intersubjective gesture, and an engage-
ment with the determinacies of my specific object.
(iii) The practice of paying attention has its form dictated by the nature
of that object. It is the character of the music that dictates what it takes
to pay attention to it: by virtue of being music, it requires that I attend
to it by listening and/or by dancing, that I attend to it in a temporal
process that can be neither rushed nor slowed, and so on; by virtue
of being this piece of music, it requires that I “get inside” the unique
musical space it is defining and that I appreciate its own internal norms
and structures. Again, it is the volleyball lesson that sets the terms for
my attention. As a student, I do not yet know how to play better – that
is precisely what I must learn – so the very video I am watching will be
teaching me about paying attention even as I engage in that practice: it
will teach me what I need to notice. Paying heed entails being led by the
object, and this “being led” is itself educational: to have the parameters
of attending dictated by the object is to have “paying attention” as an
activity that one cannot accomplish on one’s own – that is, one can aim
at it, but independently of engagement with the object, what one is to
do is not available to one.
Finally, (iv) In all our examples of attending, we are imagining
activities in which not-attending would be possible: to look at, to
stare, to listen, and to dance are all practices of committing oneself
to heeding something in situations in which one could have acted
differently. In this sense, then, attention always actualizes a possi-
bility and makes a perceptual figure out of something that could
otherwise have remained in the background. As Sartre says in Being
and Nothingness,

no one object, no group of objects is especially designed to be organized

as specifically either ground or figure; all depends on the direction of my
attention. When I enter this café to search for Pierre, there is formed a
synthetic organization of all the objects in the café, on the ground of which
Pierre is given as about to appear. This organization of the café as the
ground is an original nihilation … The original nihilation of all the [pos-
sible] figures which appear and are swallowed up in the total neutrality
28  John Russon

of a ground is the necessary condition for the appearance of the principle

figure, which is here the person of Pierre.4

All such “nihilations,” Sartre argues, “derive their origin from an act,
an expectation, or a project of a human being,” and, using the negation
that is a question as an exemplary case of this, he says, “it is essential
therefore that the questioner have the permanent possibility of disso-
ciating himself from the causal series which constitutes being.”5 The
negation that is constitutive of the experience of a figure on a ground is,
in short, a phenomenon of freedom. Indeed, this is just what is implied
in calling the practice of paying attention “an act.” Let us now look at
the conditions of this free act.

II.  The Conditions of Attention

(1) We have seen that attention, as a practice, is a meaningful and trans-

formative contribution to a situation. Acts of attending are bodily
practices – they involve positioning the eyes in certain ways, holding
the body in a chair in certain ways, and so on – and, most basically, the
condition of paying attention is the body. I cannot look at something
without the eyes of a living body, or listen to something without the
ears of a living body. The freedom to stare requires a body with mobile
eyes, and so on.6
The very embodiment that enables my staring, my looking at, or
my paying attention in general also makes this a necessary dimension
of meaning within my experience. In other words, I cannot fail to be
the kind of being for whom paying attention is an issue. Paying atten-
tion is a free act, but I am not free to choose to operate within these
parameters.7 As Hans Jonas says of organic life: “Its ‘can’ is a ‘must,’
since its execution is identical with its being. It can, but it cannot cease
to do what it can without ceasing to be. Thus the sovereignty of form
with respect to matter is also its subjection to the need of it.”8 Because
the freedom to pay attention is embodied, it is a power given by the
determinateness of that body. For that reason, this power is as much
something by which I am constrained – something I undergo – as it is
something I freely enact.9 The power to pay attention is a power of this
body, and the power thus stands in relations of necessary dependence
upon the determinateness of this body.
(2) In addition to the organic powers that enable my action, the
conditions of my attending to some aspect of a situation are the very
 Freedom and Passivity  29

determinacies of that situation itself. As we just discussed, the power to

grasp is a power of my fingers, palm, wrist, and so on, and in analogous
ways, the power to attend to a situation is a power of that situation itself.
Just as my hand makes available to me the power to grasp, it is the
determinacies of my situation that afford me the possibilities of directing
my gaze. The powers to think, to attend, to look, are rooted in the objects
of those attitudes.10 Let us consider how this is so.
Things draw our attention.11 It is the nature of our experience of things
to find them to be charged with significance, and the charge is one that
needs our compliance in order to be discharged. The experience of atten-
tion is inherently defined by responsiveness and is realized in interac-
tion: it is an emergent transformation of the perceptual situation as a whole,
rather than the application of an independent and independently defined power
to a fixed object.
As I gaze at the calendar on my wall, I experience the pressure it
holds condensed within it: it is the map of my upcoming work respon-
sibilities, and I feel its presence in my perceptual field as an imperative – an
imperative to attend to what it says – but one that I can put off a bit
longer. The very way the calendar is held within my perceptual field
is as a kind of pressure, a kind of beckoning. It is not a deterministic
force, however – it is, rather, a seed of possible significance that requires
my compliance to grow – and I have some freedom of movement with
respect to it, with respect to whether I address it directly, hold it at bay,
or let it wither and die. The calendar is an offer and a provocation, and
the question is whether I will give myself over to it.
Just as things can invite my attention, they can also repel it or refuse
it. For example, in trying to learn how to play a song, I may find that I
very much desire to listen to the melody the saxophone plays during
the bridge section. Nonetheless, every time I listen to the tune, I find
myself taken up in the flow of the song, and by the time the bridge sec-
tion comes around, I have lost track of my mission. Despite my effort to
hold on to my focused concentration, I find myself taken up in – over-
whelmed by – the flow of the music. My attention is thus not strictly
under my self-control, but is under the sway of the object to which it
has directed itself.
Both as invitations and as refusals, the objects of our attention show
themselves to be complicit in the accomplishing of the activity of paying
attention. Some of the richness of this structure is evident in the familiar
phenomenon of not being able to “get into” a sentence one is reading,
an experience that has a few interesting dimensions. Sometimes, when
30  John Russon

one is trying to read, one finds oneself going through the words without
making any real sense of them. Typically, this is because one is preoc-
cupied by some other thought. One goes back and tries again, and the
experience of trying to get into the meaning is a bit like the experience
of diving into a swimming pool. In order to pay attention, one actually
tries to give up one’s detached control of one’s consciousness in order
to let the sentence take over. There are at least three related aspects to
this familiar experience that pertain to my theme here. The first is that
paying attention entails giving up one’s detached, self-controlled stance
and giving oneself over to the object, and to the way it gives itself: to
pay heed to the object is to put it in the position of leadership and thus
to let go of one’s own ability to control how one’s attending proceeds.
The second is that the experience that the words – one’s object – must let
one in: they can function as a repelling surface off which one’s attending
intention bounces. The third is what is revealed in the initial experience
of distraction: another thought held my attention and would not release
it, such that, while I intended to attend to the reading, my attention was
drawn back repeatedly to the “preoccupying” thought.12
To pay attention, then, is to make oneself answerable to the demands
of the object.13 The demands of the object are themselves meaningful,
which is to say they speak to a free being (on which, more below), and
for that reason they are themselves ambiguous. The demands of the
object are not deterministic causes (as Sartre noted above), but “affor-
dances” in that they afford different possible interactions, or “motiva-
tions,” in the language of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.14 Attending is not
simply a “yes/no” matter, not simply a butting up against each other
of aliens, but a meaningful interaction, more like a dialogue between
partners. My attending to the thing is a constructive interaction that
involves decision and self-expression. Attention, then, is not like a
detached, panoptic “searchlight” that indifferently surveys a set of
fixed, determinate objects.15 Rather, as Merleau-Ponty says, “attention,
then, does not exist as a general and formal activity. There is in each
case a particular freedom to gain, and a particular mental space to keep
in order.”16 Attending to the thing is engaging with a meaningful field
of possible developments in a dialogue in which one’s own ability to
attend to the thing is itself contingent on the forms of engagement afforded
by the thing.17
(3) We said above that the “demands of the object” are themselves
meaningful. This is because the objects of my world are already medi-
ated by the parameters of my projects (vital, emotional, personal, etc.).18
 Freedom and Passivity  31

Things can be meaningful calls to be heeded only if they are integrated

within the fabric of our world. The thing and I must first belong together
if there is to be between us any issue of interaction, any issue of respon-
siveness. The thing can thus stand out as calling for my attention only
if that call itself rests on a shared basic fabric, a shared participation in
the real.19 To experience the thing as a meaningful call, I must first be at
home with it.
Being at home in the world is, most basically, being with things in
such a way that they “make room” for one – one has a place in them.
Indeed, whatever we might do to develop this, any such development
can itself happen only because the things of our world are already in
principle open to us. There must, first, be for us a world, be a world
for us. Our very nature, in other words, must be being-in-the-world,
an already-co-definedness of self and world. We do not accomplish
our original relation to the world, but find ourselves already engaged,
already stretched outside of ourselves “there.” Our being is a being-
there and hence determinate – already shaped by space, mood and
others, by determinateness, our attitude towards it, and a perspective
of others upon us.20 In this way, our nature is by necessity passive at
its root – it is only on the basis of this already givenness, this already
determinate-ness, that there can be for us any possibility: our “I can”
rests essentially on this givenness.
Beyond this original, given being-at-home, we also accomplish a more
developed being-at-home through habituation.21 We saw above that our
acts of paying attention are always contextualized, and it is the homi-
ness of our habituated being-in-the-world that provides this context.
The processes of habituation through which we establish this devel-
oped hominess are primarily processes of establishing highly devel-
oped relationships of comfortable engagement with things, precisely
such that we do not have to “pay attention” to them. Through practice,
I develop a new power to act in the world. This new power is itself
a “becoming at home” in things that were formerly alien to me. By
developing this habit, I move from a situation of self-conscious alien-
ated engagement, in which I must pay explicit heed to the thing, to a
stance of absorption, in which I need not attend to the alienation of that
thing, for it is now accommodated to me. But in thus allowing me to be
at home in it, the thing has also taken power over me. I give over my
agency to it and can no longer control it: I now rely upon the automatic
agency of my habits to do the work for me of establishing my comfort-
able relationship with the world, and by establishing this situation by
32  John Russon

which I do not need to take explicit responsibility for carrying out my

actions, I equally give away this power. My power is now the power of
that definite habit, which gives itself to me and can be withdrawn. Just
as our organic embodiment has a determinateness that empowers us
precisely by binding us to it as a necessity outside our control, so do our
processes of habituation establish for us determinate modes of relating
to the world that empower us precisely by falling out of our reach and
becoming, for us, necessities. Our acts of paying attention rest on such
habituations.
These habitualities that come to provide a passive dimension to atten-
tion reveal the developed character of our perception. There has already
been an investment of freedom – agency and work – involved in estab-
lishing this perceptual passivity. Habit – the fundamental “material” of
our being at home in the world – ambiguously functions as both sides
of the agency–passivity pair: it is itself an enactment of agency, but it
plays the role of passivity to further agency. On the one hand, habits,
like all the other conditions of perception, reveal that freedom is always
an enactment of the freedom of movement afforded by the determina-
cies of a situation; on the other hand, habits, in their developed char-
acter, reveal that freedom is a transformative power that is capable of
redefining the significance of those very determinacies. While freedom
is emergent from the determinacies of our situation, it is not defined by
those determinacies. What I want to consider now is the way in which
our free activity reveals that what we might call the “worldly” dimen-
sions of our passivity are not sufficient on their own to set a norm for
our freedom, and that it is distinctly the intersubjective dimension of
our freedom that offers the possibility of norms.

III.  Freedom as Such: Work and Communication

The first thing for us to notice overall in these discussions is that the
free and the determined are not opposed. Indeed, freedom just is deter-
minacy. Freedom is the power to act, the “I can,” and that is always
the power of a given determinacy, and therefore a passivity. The very
freedom that characterizes anything is also the givenness by which it
is constrained. Let us consider this issue now in relation to the distinc-
tive sense of freedom that is freedom as such, as opposed to any spe-
cific power: the freedom to dwell in the possible, to live a determinacy
beyond its determinacy, to come at the present from the future. It is this
freedom that, as we saw above, allows us to alter creatively the figure/
 Freedom and Passivity  33

ground structure of experience through the act of “paying attention.”

I want now to consider this “living beyond” as such, or for itself. We
saw above that the freedom of attention is embedded in the world: it
is the freedom “of” determinateness, and it grows through a deepen-
ing of its engagement with things that is simultaneously a growth and
a loss of itself. We will now consider further this theme of engagement
as such, by considering the engagement with things that is the free-
dom of work and the engagement with persons that is the freedom of
communication.
(1) In work, I engage with my object in order to bring forth from it
something it makes possible. Work can never simply be an imposition of
a pre-established reality upon a thing, for the condition of the imposi-
tion is that the thing itself make room for that imposition within its own
nature. A child in frustration can wail at the world because its desires
are not being fulfilled. The simple fact of its desire, however, is insuf-
ficient to transform the world. Work is committing oneself to operate
within the terms the object makes available to bring about a fulfilment
of one’s desire. Work is therefore a coordinated engagement: to work is
to learn how to have the world fulfil one’s desires.
Because the product of work takes its definition from my desire, the
object upon which I work is insufficient on its own to account for the
product. The work operates within the terms the thing makes available,
but it also exceeds those terms. The work brings into being a possibility
for the thing that the thing alone was insufficient to accomplish. Work
shows that things are not fully determinate in themselves, but are inher-
ently open, that is, the “what” of a thing is always rooted in a domain of
possibility: the thing itself opens itself up to possibilities of redefinition
that are only possible through the freedom we bring to bear upon those
things.22 In principle, the things of our world are open to our definitive
freedom – if they were not so in principle, our freedom could never
affect them and there would be no such thing as work, as artifice. This
horizon of redefinition that is the possibility hovering above the determinacy
of each thing is the same openness that characterized the object-as-motive that
the act of attention transformed into a perceptual figure. Attention is thus a
form of work, and work a developed form of attention.
As I work upon the world, I am changed as much as the world is
changed. The desire that refuses to learn the terms of possibility
afforded by things is impotent, and is forced by its stubbornness into
an isolated alienation from the world. This impotent subject will not
learn the terms of the world and hence is ineffective; equally, it faces
34  John Russon

a world that is a hard, sealed surface, an impenetrable realm of fixity.

This is the world of things that are wholly self-defined and determinate
in themselves. The subject becomes potent in the same move by which
the thing is removed from the presumption of essentialism. In working,
I establish my own potency in the same move by which I realize the
potentiality within the thing.23 Approaching the thing so as to bring out
of it what it cannot bring out of itself is also the move in which I become
a being capable of participating, a being capable of making a difference
within the domain opened up by the things of the world.
Inasmuch as it is through engagement that I move from impotence to
a determinate “I can,” it is through thus working with the world that I
become meaningfully free. I am free in principle inasmuch as I inhabit
the domain of possibility, the domain essentially defined by the pri-
macy of the future (which rejects the authority of the “presentness” of
the actuality of the thing). I am actually free to the extent that I inhabit
this futurity by realizing possibilities in the world, to the extent that I
realize this freedom, embody it in the world. What this means is that
my freedom is realized as the world allowing me to act. I am free to
the extent that the determinateness of my world admits of my power
to realize the possible within it. Like the act of attention, the activity of
working is a reality accomplished as a kind of dialogue in which I enact
the possibilities of this thing: my freedom is its freedom to be otherwise.
Work and attention are not impositions of one reality upon another, but
the enactment of a co-reality. Let us take this up from the side of the “I.”
In this work through which my freedom is accomplished, my engage-
ment with reality is a kind of identification: what I am cannot be sepa-
rated from the things through which I embodied this potency. In work-
ing I thus make myself determinate – I give my developed, free identity
an embodiment in my things comparable to the embodiment of natural
capacity that is my organic body. It is by committing myself (rather
than holding back in withdrawn impotence) that I establish myself as
a power, as a reality, and the more definite I am, the more powerful I
am. At the same time, precisely by embedding my power and identity
in these things, I am giving myself away, giving myself over to the sup-
portive power of those things. I gain power to act in the world pre-
cisely by losing the power to control those powers – I commit myself
to them and thus become dependent upon them, answerable to them.
To be free through them requires that they be necessary for me. I become
“me” through them precisely by having them become other to me –
they embody my “I can” only by themselves being a zone of “I cannot.”
 Freedom and Passivity  35

But now notice also what this means from the side of the world.
Merleau-Ponty criticizes both empiricism and rationalism for operat-
ing with the prejudice that the world is determinate in itself.24 In the
domain of attention, this means that the “what” of our perceptual object
cannot be defined separately from the significance it acquires through
our way of taking it up. Analogously, if things are open in principle to
freedom – as they demonstrate themselves to be through our success-
fully working with them – then we cannot appeal to essentialism to
call our acts “impositions” or to argue that we are mishandling them.
If things by nature make room for our freedom, then they, on their
own, are metaphysically insufficient to provide a norm for judging the
legitimacy of our free transformations of their reality. How, then, might
norms emerge within this domain of determinate freedom?
Here I think the crucial point is one we saw above, namely, that it
is given that our world is a world with others. My involvement with
other persons – other beings of possibility – is not something optional;
rather, it is an ever-present dimension of significance within my experi-
ence. What this means experientially is that the very way in which the
things of my world are given to me is as open to the freedom of others,
just as they are open to my freedom. Thus, while the determinacy of
the thing is insufficient by itself to establish its nature, it is also not the
case that my say-so is automatically decisive, for the domain in which I
realize the possible within the thing is a zone of contestation, a zone of
engagement with the equally compelling engagements of others with
that thing.25 Inhabiting the world of freedom is thus necessarily inhabit-
ing a world defined by the demand for communication. Let us now turn
to this last domain, to complete our story of freedom.
(2) To engage with a thing is to participate in the world, to reject the
zone of impotent alienation and commit oneself to determinacy. But par-
ticipating in the world is making oneself answerable to the perspectives
of others. This means that at root, the meaning of “things” in our world is
always a call to communication, a call to community. And this coordina-
tion of our freedom with that of others is not some second action that
follows on a basic involvement; it is, rather, what we must always be
accomplishing in any engagement with things. We saw above that our
developed identities are co-identities, that is, they are identifications
with the world such that we exist as the freedom of a situation. This
discussion of our inherent “being-with” entails that the very fabric of
this developed co-reality is itself communication: we are “made out of”
a successfully accomplished communication with others that is realized
36  John Russon

as the meaningful things of our (shared) world. We are thus “made out
of” language, so to speak, and the imperative inherent in our free real-
ization of the possibilities in things is the imperative to communicate:
my action is true, what I accomplish is real, when it is afforded room
by the freedom of others that is implicit in the determinacy of things.
So freedom is ultimately enacted in transformative gestures that
realize themselves in the accomplishment of a new, shared perception.
When such gestures follow along familiar paths, this is the second-
order expression of which Merleau-Ponty speaks.26 But inasmuch as we
experience our freedom as such, we experience in the situation the call
of the future, and answering to this call is a special sort of gesture. The
future is not prescribed, that is, the possibility of the situation is not
reducible to its given determinacy. What this situation is to be – the
very norm by which its present will be defined – is undecidable in that
present.27 Living freedom as freedom, the experience of freedom as such,
is the experience of inhabiting this undecidable urgency. To be free is
fully realized on its own terms in inhabiting the demand emergent
from one’s situation that one be that situation’s deliverance, that one
accomplish its future. The actions that enact such freedom are a distinct
sort of gesture, unlike the familiar gestures of an already accomplished
communication through the world. When gestures carry the weight of
breaking new ground for our own freedom, that is, for realizing as such
our identity as beings of possibility, this is art – first-order expression –
in the broad sense.28 It is in these gestures that we express our freedom
as such, and they are thus gestures the explicit nature of which is to
appeal to the freedom of others for their own realization and definition.
These originary gestures that ultimately and most fully enact our
freedom are thus by their nature questions, that is, they call upon oth-
ers to establish their meaning and, indeed, their very legitimacy.29 Such
gestures express our intention to deliver the situation of the identity it
cannot accomplish on its own: the goal is not to impose but to deliver,
to accomplish what it needs. But inasmuch as our actions are always
single in a context that is inherently shared, we necessarily always act in
such a way as to risk this imposition, and it is only after the fact that we
will find whether the future we realized in the thing is accepted by real-
ity. Said otherwise, we must wait upon the confirmation of the world
to find out if we were acting idiosyncratically or truthfully, that is, on
behalf of our shared world. Freedom is this experience of the world as
the urgent demand to identify with it, and to identify with it as a shared
inter-human world, but this urgent demand is constitutive of the very
 Freedom and Passivity  37

nature of the real and for that reason is not a demand that can ever be
fulfilled in the sense of “disposed of.” It is the permanent core of mean-
ing in our lives that we struggle with this issue.

Conclusion: Freedom, Passivity, and Normativity

Taking attention as an exemplary phenomenon of freedom, I have

argued that our active nature is inseparable from constitutive dimen-
sions of passivity. The “freedom of movement,” so to speak, that we
experience in our ability to pay heed is rooted in the giving powers of
the body, of our objects, of others, of the world, and of the history of
our habituation: our power is the power of these determinacies, and
whatever we can describe as our own ability can equally be described as their
affordance. But the very fact that these things give themselves to the
realization of freedom means they are vulnerable to that freedom and
cannot by themselves define it. It is our answerability to others that is
the dimension of passivity that is the reason we find ourselves answer-
able to an unfulfillable demand to make our freedom the deliverance
of the true significance of the world rather than just an exploitation of
its availability.30

NOTES

  1 Introduction, chapter 3, “Attention and Judgment,” PP 50–6[28–34].

  2 For a nuanced discussion of the rich complexity of the phenomenon of
attention, see Casey, “Attending and Glancing,” esp. 311–35. See also
Vermersch, “Attention,” 52–4; and Bredlau, “Learning to See.”
  3 On the idea that the experience of self-possession must be accomplished
through learning, compare Dewey, Experience and Education, 64: “The ideal
aim of education is creation of power of self-control”; see also his Human
Nature and Conduct, pt I, s. II, “Habit and Will,” 24–42; and his Democracy
and Education, ch. 6, “Education as Conservative and Progressive,” 69–80.
 4 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 41. Cf. PP 53[32].
  5 Ibid., 59, 58.
 6 Cf. PP 74–5[48–9].
  7 Cf. Depraz, “Where Is the Phenomenology of Attention?,” 14–15.
 8 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 83.
 9 See VI 274–5[221], working note from November 1959: “The soul always
thinks: this is in it a property of its state, it cannot not think because a
38  John Russon

field has been opened into which something or the absence of something is
always inscribed. This is not an activity of the soul, nor a production of
thoughts in the plural, and I am not even the author of the hollow that
forms within me by the passage from the present to the retention, it is not I
who makes myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat.”
10 See VI 247194], working note from 20 May 1959: “The things have us, and ...
not we who have the things.”
11 The theme of the alluring, affective attraction of would-be objects of
attention is richly explored in Steinbock, “Affection and Attraction.”
12 Cf. ibid., 31.
13 See ibid., 32.
14 “Affordance” is the language of James J. Gibson. See, for example, his
Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 36 and passim, and the discussion
in Greeno, “Gibson’s Affordances.” For Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of
“motivation, see PP 75–7[49–51].
15 For a critique of the “searchlight” model of attention, see Arvidson,
“Toward a Phenomenology of Attention.”
16 PP 53[32]. See also the references to the “field” (champs) of freedom in PP
501[462], and in VI 150[112], 274–5[221].
17 Cf. Noah Moss Brender’s discussion of the confusion of “mobility of
perspective” with “freedom from perspective” in ch. 7 of this volume.
18 Cf. PP 32–3[9–10].
19 This is a theme Merleau-Ponty discusses substantially under the heading
“the flesh”; see esp. “The Intertwining – the Chiasm,” ch. 4 of VI 181[137]:
“If [the body] touches [things] and sees them, this is only because, being of
their family, itself visible and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to
participate in theirs, because each of the two beings is an archetype for the
other, because the body belongs to the order of the things as the world is
universal flesh.”
20 On our being already defined by mood and intersubjectivity, see Maclaren,
“Emotional Disorder,” esp. 142–6.
21 On the theme of the habitually developed character of the experience of
home, see Jacobson, “A Developed Nature.”
22 See PP 28[6–7].
23 This is the essential point of Hegel’s analysis of work in his discussion of
the relationship of “master and slave” in Phenomenology of Spirit, paras.
194–6.
24 PP 50[28].
25 This is the core of Husserl’s argument in the fifth of his Cartesian
Meditations – that intersubjectivity is the condition for objectivity; see
 Freedom and Passivity  39

89–108, esp. s. 49. This entails, as we shall see, that inasmuch as attention
involves an appeal to objectivity, it is always implicitly joint attention and
thus always implicitly presupposes communication.
26 See PP 217n2[530n6] (note to 183).
27 Cf. PP 218[184]: “In understanding others, the problem is always
indeterminate because only the solution to the problem will make the
givens retrospectively appear as convergent.”
28 See PP 216–19[182–5].
29 See PP 225[191]: “I confirm the other person, and the other person
confirms me.”
30 I am grateful to Len Lawlor for the invitation to deliver this paper as a
keynote address to the 2007 meeting of the Merleau-Ponty Circle.